


Something Wild To Run With

by ErikaWilliams



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Fluff, M/M, One-sided Ignoct, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 20:40:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13689420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErikaWilliams/pseuds/ErikaWilliams
Summary: Promptio Soul Mate AU written for Valentine's Day 2018.Prompto's soul mate mark is obscured by the bar code on his wrist, and Gladio covered his with his tattoo because it didn't make any sense.





	Something Wild To Run With

Prompto hated this stupid holiday and everything it stood for. All the way from work to Crownsguard training, all he saw were happy couples out celebrating the fact that they had found that one special person, the one who’s name matched the one marking their skin. Then, when he finally made it to training, he found it had been canceled so they could celebrate the holiday. 

He kicked a rock as he made his way home. Stupid holiday. Stupid marks. They were supposed to make it easier to find your true love, not doom you to a life of loneliness. He probably wouldn’t be so despondent about the whole thing if he actually had a mark. But for whatever reason, he had been born without one. 

He opened the door to his parents’ apartment, finding the lights off and his parents no where to be found. There was a note on the refrigerator, telling him that there was a microwave dinner in the freezer he could have, but they had gone out to celebrate their love for each other. It was disgusting. He went into his bedroom and flopped down on the bed, idly fingering the band on his wrist. No one was around, not even his parents, so it technically wasn’t breaking his promise. 

He slipped the band off and scrutinized the barcode on the back of his wrist. Either he had been born without a mark, or someone had deliberately tried to obscure it. Sometimes when he stared at it really closely, he thought he saw clunky letters behind the lines. On days he was feeling really desperate, he thought the first letter could be a G. But it could easily be an O or a C or any other letter for that matter. It was equally possible that he was imaging the whole thing, and there was no name on his wrist, just the stupid barcode. Maybe the barcode was tied into the whole reason why he didn’t have a mark to begin with.

He may have hated the holiday, but he had promised Noct that he would hang out with him and his retainers for the evening. None of them had met their soul mates yet either, or in Noct’s case he was separated from his, so Noct had asked him to come along so they could go to the bar with all the other losers who hadn’t met their mates yet. He wasn’t sure why he had agreed to it in the first place, other than the fact that misery loves company.

He dreaded the evening even as he got changed for it. His only consolation was that the others were also alone. As far as he knew, Noct was the only on in their group that had actually met his soul mate. He wore his mark with pride, Lunafreya’s name etched in eloquent cursive on his forearm. He wasn’t shy about showing it off to anyone who asked, even though they were separated for the moment.

He had never seen Ignis and Gladio’s marks even though he was sure they would have them. The odds that he was not the only one who had been born without one were far too slim for him to expect his friends to be in that group as well. When he had asked Ignis about his mark, he had gotten sullen and refused to answer any more of his questions for the day. He had a feeling it was somewhere on his hands, and that was why he had never seen him without the gloves.

He had asked Gladio about his once as well, when curiosity had gotten the better of him. He had seen Gladio in far less clothes than he was comfortable admitting, so he was fairly sure he should have seen something by now. Which lead him to believe that it was in a very intimate spot. But when he had asked Gladio about it, Gladio told him that the whole concept was stupid and that it was the worst decision the Six had ever made. Probably because it cramped his style with the ladies or something. Must have been hard for him to get ladies to come back to his place when they would see someone else’s name plastered on his body. It would have been sweet poetic justice if it would have been a man’s name, which would almost make him feel better about the fact that he didn’t even have a mark. It wasn’t his name though. He was fairly sure Gladio would have said something to him by now if that were the case.

He ended up being late meeting them, mostly because he was still wondering if he should just call the whole thing off. This was the worst night of the year. It was also one of the worst nights for strange women to approach Noct, claiming that his name was on their bodies. Which usually lead to Gladio inspecting them, as if he would know what the matching mark to Noct’s would look like. As far as he knew, Gladio had never met Lady Lunafreya officially. He supposed they could have sent him a picture. The worst had been when a young woman had insisted that the mark was on her inner thigh, and had insisted on showing all of them right at the table. He was not looking forward to this evening at all, and he groaned as he sat down at the table with the rest of them.

“Tough day at work, Prompto?” Noct asked from across the table.

“Something like that,” he murmured, because while his friends knew that he was not a fan of the holiday, he had never gotten around to telling them why. A large part of him was afraid that they would start seeing him differently. Even worse, they might pity him, and that was the last thing he wanted from them.

“A night out will make you feel better,” Gladio said before slapping him on the back.

“I was just about to check out the skiball,” Noct said, and he knew it was an invitation for him to join him. But he thought he would be better left alone at the table, where he wouldn’t have to watch strangers come up and try to convince the other three that they had their names on their skin. No one knew his name, so no one tried that stunt with him.

“I’ll join you in a bit,” he said, waving them off. He watched as they disappeared into the crowd, then dropped his head onto the table. This was stupid. He should have just stayed home, gone to bed, and forgotten about this stupid holiday.

He didn’t know how long they had been gone, or how long he had been sitting there, wallowing in his self pity, staring at the band on his wrist hiding the barcode and wondering what his friends would think if they knew he didn’t have a mark. For that matter, what would they think about the barcode?

He nearly jumped out of his skin when Gladio sat down on the chair next to him with another slap to his back. “What going on, Prompto?” he asked. “This isn’t like you.”

“It’s nothing,” he said, turning his head away, because sometimes when he looked at Gladio, especially during this stupid holiday, the fact that he didn’t even have a mark hit him even harder. “I’m just keeping the table for us.” It was a stupid excuse. There was no way they were going to lose the table. There were at least five other empty ones in the immediate vicinity, and he wasn’t sure any of them were even going to eat anything while they were there.

“Does it have something to do with the holiday?” Gladio asked.

Prompto winced and almost turned around to face him. There was no point in hiding from it now. Once Gladio wanted to know something, he had a way of finding it out.

“Is it that obvious?” he asked, watching the other people milling around, anything except for turning around and looking at Gladio, the one person he wanted to actually look at.

“Well, you asked me and Ignis about our marks, but you never offered to show us yours.” So Gladio had been talking to Ignis about this too. Maybe even Noct. He wondered if the only reason Gladio had come over was because he had drawn the short straw when they were deciding who was going to have this conversation with him. “Something wrong with your mark?”

He turned around so that he could look at Gladio, stupid, perfect Gladio who was probably on a mad search to find the owner of his mark and that was why he flirted with every unattached woman they came across. Honesty was probably the best policy. He couldn’t hide this from his friends forever. “I don’t have a mark,” he said before shrinking back. “Pretty pathetic, huh?”

“It doesn’t seem that bad,” Gladio told him with a roll of his shoulders. “There are plenty of other things that could go wrong, like your mark could give you the name of a person who’s marked by someone else.”

His eyes widened. “You?” That would explain why Gladio had been so reluctant to show him his.

“I shouldn’t have told you that. Forget I said anything.” 

So not Gladio then. “Ignis?” he asked, and then he had a million other questions, like who was it that Ignis thought he had to keep it covered by his gloves all the time. Now he was more convinced than ever that was where his mark was.

“I told you to forget I said anything.”

He wasn’t going to get any more answers on that subject, although it did give him something to think about. Maybe having a mark was not all it was cracked up to be. Gladio certainly didn’t seem to care about his. “Can I see yours?” he asked tentatively.

“No,” Gladio told him, just like he had all the other times. He shouldn’t have been disappointed. He really hadn’t been expecting anything else. “I had them cover it up with my tattoo. It’s right over my left collarbone.”

“Why would you do something like that?” He couldn’t believe it. Gladio actually had a mark, could probably live a normal life and track down the person who it matched, and he had gone and covered it up. How was his soul mate supposed to know that he was telling the truth if they couldn’t see their mark on him?

“It was stupid. It was a tiny set of random letters and numbers. Noct kept telling me that it meant my soul mate was going to be some sort of robot.”

Weird, but it was totally better than not having one at all. And it seemed that Gladio was just as insecure about his mark as Prompto was about his lack of one. 

“Maybe its not a robot,” Prompto suggested. “Maybe its the serial code on a very specific Cup Noodles?”

“Those are just numbers,” Gladio said as if the possibility had already crossed his mind. “This had letters in it as well.”

“Maybe it’s someone’s science experiment,” he said jokingly, leaning closer towards Gladio.

“Quit it,” Gladio responded back to him. “Stupid comments like that are exactly why I covered it up in the first place.”

“Aren’t you interested in finding your true love?” he teased, and he was starting to feel better about his situation already. It seemed like Ignis and Gladio weren’t in a better situation than he was, although he wasn’t sure he would have traded places with either of them. “Maybe it’s some sort of evil clone.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gladio told him, and Prompto had to admit, that would be kind of weird.


End file.
